The Cultural Transmission In College English Teaching

This dissertation has been written on the base of research achievements of scholars at home and abroad on culture teaching since the 1960's. A detailed analysis of the sociocultural test shows that cultural factors play an important role in college English teaching and the writer tries to discuss deeply the cultural transmission in it.The researches of linguistics, anthropology and psychology structure the theory base of culture teaching. As far as linguistics is concerned, Robert Lado and M.A.K. Halliday think that the culture plays an important role in foreign language teaching. Dell Hymes also states that a language, an organization of variables, is influenced by many factors, in which culture is an important part of communicative competence in terms of his theory of communicative competence. It is, in China, until the 1980's that scholars undertook to pay more attention to the research on culture teaching and intercultural communication. Mr. Xu Guozhang once indicated that, in different languages, many words with equivalent surface meanings virtually have different cultural connotations due to different traditions and value systems. Therefore many scholars began to attach importance to the cultural problems concerned about intercultural communication in foreign language teaching. Anthropology is well connected with the study of culture. Edward Hall, a famous anthropologist, published his works The Silent Language in 1959. He expounded the relationship between culture and language as well as nonverbal communication. Hall highlights the importance of culture in cross-cultural communication and delivers the interacted relations between language and culture. Also he emphasizes that in human life culture has penetrated anywhere, no exception. And a hypothesis, produced by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf disclosed the relation between language and culture. In related to psychology, Culture's Consequences and Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, written by Geert Hofstede conveys a complete analysis of culture and cultural differences. Hofstede calls culture "mental programming" and "software of the mind". He holds that culture is just like the programs of a computer, which controls the behaviors of human beings to some degree.However, English teachers in China paid little attention to the cultural teaching. In May 2004, the writer conducted a test on students' sociocultural knowledge. The subjects are 200 students in...